Her dad was still dazed, still not really in his body, or his head, and certainly not with her in this sterile hospital corridor. Gently she took his hand and led him outside to the street. Someone had moved their car further down the road during the day, away from the emergency entrance, so she headed there, then fished around in her dad’s jacket pocket for the keys and unlocked the doors.
Quickly she pushed him into the passenger seat and wrapped the seatbelt around him, then buckled herself in on the driver’s side and slowly, cautiously, pulled away and moved out into the traffic, grateful that Brodie’s friend’s house wasn’t too far away. Driving in her current state wasn’t a great idea, but she was more present than her father right now.
Glancing over at him as she paused at a stop sign, she saw the raw agony etched into his face, and the frozen stiffness of his body made her chest feel as though it would explode with pain. As broken as she felt by her mother’s death, it was hitting her dad even harder. Fear gripped her insides as she wondered whether she’d be able to reach him. She couldn’t lose him too.
Struggling to catch her breath, she turned into the street where Brodie’s friend lived, and pulled up haphazardly out the front of the house. She told her dad that she’d only be a minute, but if he heard her, he didn’t bother to respond.
Steeling herself, she walked up and knocked on the door, head spinning as she tried to work out what to say to whoever answered. And, far more importantly, what she should tell her brother. He was only five years old. Would he even be able to grasp the truth of what it meant that their mother was dead?
Dead. The word had lost all sense of meaning to her – it was too big, too complex, too tiny, too not-enough to even begin to explain the concept they were going to have to work out how to live with. Could they do it? Could she?
The opening of the door broke into her reverie, and she tried to paste a calm, reassuring smile on her face for Ben’s mum. “Rhiannon my dear, hello,” the woman said nervously. “Would you like to come in?”
“Thanks Mrs Pearson, but Dad’s waiting in the car. Is Brodie ready to come home?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. The woman peered at her searchingly.
“Ben! Brodie! Come down here, it’s time for Brodie to go home now,” she called out, as Rhiannon tried to understand the woman’s response to her.
“So, um, is your mum, well, is she…” Mrs Pearson began, but broke off, relieved, as the two boys hurtled down the stairs.
Rhiannon nearly broke down, right there on this woman’s doorstep, when she saw the happiness on her brother’s face as he raced his friend to the door. Was she going to have to be the one to turn his life upside down? To wipe the joy from his eyes, and his heart? A wave of anger rushed through her, and a boom of thunder rumbled overhead as the sky darkened.
Ben’s mum shivered. “Looks like we’re in for a cool change,” she said, as she put her hands on her son’s shoulders and drew him closer to her, as though she could shield him from physical storms, as well as the emotional turbulence of loss. Sadly, Rhiannon was now painfully aware that she couldn’t. No one could.
Finally the woman mustered a shaky smile. “Brodie’s always welcome to stay with us, if things are… well, if you need that, okay?” she offered, her words as they tumbled out betraying just how awkward she felt.
“Thank you, that means a lot to us,” Rhiannon replied. “I’ll let Dad know.” Hearing the tremor in her voice, she quickly took Brodie’s hand and turned towards the car, desperate to get away from the woman’s pity-filled eyes. She felt uncomfortable enough, without having to try to make things easier for other people.
Sighing with exhaustion, she wondered if this was how everyone would look at her now – sympathy mixed with terror, and a desperate worry that it could happen to them too. Almost as though death was contagious, and if they got too close to her they would lose someone they loved as well.
She’d never felt so alone, so alien, so not-herself.
Buckling Brodie into the back of the car, she returned to the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition.
“Hi Dad,” Brodie said in his achingly innocent little voice.
Mike didn’t answer though, and Rhiannon turned fiery eyes on him.
“Dad,” she hissed, trying to pierce his daze. “Brodie’s here.”
He turned empty eyes to him, and gave a half-hearted wave. “Hey buddy,” he said softly, vaguely, vacantly. “How was school?”
Rhiannon pulled the car onto the road and headed for home, relieved that Brodie kept up a running commentary of his day, and his adventures with Ben, and didn’t seem to notice that their father had checked out emotionally. Uncertain of how to reach him, she turned in to their driveway, bundled Brodie out of the car and stomped into the kitchen.
While her brother played outside, ignoring the gathering storm, and her dad sat shell-shocked on the couch, she picked up her broken dish from that morning – had it really only been twelve hours ago? – then started pulling things out of the pantry, banging pots and pans, rattling cutlery and attacking the vegetables with a fury she couldn’t contain.
Then, as dinner bubbled on the stove, she went through the house like a whirlwind, tidying away books and toys, picking up discarded clothes in her and Brodie’s rooms and throwing them in the washing machine, vacuuming the hallway and mopping the bathroom floor, all so she didn’t have to think.
When there was nothing left to clean, she stood at the top of the stairs, looking at the door to her parents’ room, paralysed. Her thoughts slipped backwards to that morning, when she’d rushed up to check on her mum. The door still stood ajar from their hurried departure, and she walked slowly towards it, as if being drawn in. Then on the threshold she froze, the scent of her mother’s jasmine perfume drifting out, and clouding her mind and her heart.
Just before she stepped inside, the aroma of the curry she’d been cooking snaked up the stairs to her, and she raced back down to the kitchen, lowering the flame and stirring the saucepan full of vegies and chickpeas just before it boiled over, and burning her mouth as she checked the rice that was cooking in the pot next to it.
Swearing, she turned the burner off and poured the rice into a strainer, then went to check on her dad. He was sitting in the same position he’d collapsed into when they got home, and he didn’t even look up when she walked into the room.
“Dad,” she said softly, but he didn’t respond. Kneeling down in front of him, she placed a hand on his arm, yet he remained oblivious.
“Dad,” she repeated, a little louder this time, a little less patient, and he finally gazed up at her, with eyes that didn’t even seem to recognise her.
“Yes?” he muttered.
“Dad, dinner’s ready.”
“I’m not hungry,” he sighed.
“You have to eat. Brodie has to eat,” she retorted firmly.
“Brodie?”
“Dad! Your son Brodie. He needs to eat. And you need to tell him –”
This time it was her voice that cracked, her voice that couldn’t get the words out. How would they tell her baby brother that he’d lost his mother?
“Anyway, dinner is ready, so could you go and get Brodie from out the back, so we can eat together?”
He stared at her blankly for a moment, but eventually he stood up and headed outside, returning with his son while Rhiannon set the table. Sheepishly he took a seat, and smiled wanly at his daughter as she served out the dinner. Without waiting to say grace, he picked up his spoon and dug it into the fragrant bowl of curry and rice, but he stopped abruptly, food halfway between bowl and mouth, when Brodie spoke.
“Where’s Mumma?” he asked, then popped a spoonful of curry into his mouth while he waited for the answer.
Rhiannon gasped, and for a moment Mike’s eyes took on that faraway look, but then he put his spoon down and reached across the table to take his son’s hand. “Remember what we were talking about last week buddy?” he began carefully.
She stared at their dad in consternation. Going away?
Mike glanced at her as though he could read her thoughts, and grimaced, but he forced a smile onto his face as he looked back at Brodie. “That’s right. She’s gone to stay with the angels,” he whispered, voice tortured.
“Okay,” Brodie said calmly. “Can I go to Ben’s tomorrow after school?” His matter-of-fact tone chilled Rhiannon.
“Sure,” Mike replied shakily. “I’ll call his mum after dinner.”
Brodie smiled, not picking up on the tension in the room, and started telling them about the fort they were going to build in Ben’s backyard. Then he abruptly changed the subject.
“Dad, can I get a pet?” he asked. His voice was plaintive, but not whiny, and Rhiannon wondered suddenly how much he did understand of their current situation.
The phone rang then, breaking her out of her whirling thoughts, and they listened in growing horror as Beth’s voice boomed out, filling the room as she greeted whoever had rung and thanked them for their call, before instructing them to leave a message. Mike and Rhiannon sat frozen, while Brodie grinned and said “Mumma”.
“Hi Mike, hi kids, it’s Rose. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I just, well… I just can’t believe Beth is gone,” she said, sniffing tearfully. “I just wanted to make sure you know that if you need anything, you only have to ask. I’ll bring around some dinner for you tomorrow night, so you don’t have to worry about that at least, but anything else, please give me a call. I’m thinking of you all, and sending so much love,” she added, compassion in her voice.
“Oh, and I called the restaurant, to let them know we won’t be in tonight, and they’re fine with that. Talk soon…”
The restaurant. Tonight was meant to be a big celebration for Beth’s fortieth birthday. Instead they were sitting at home without her, and the only thing left to plan was her funeral. As the answering machine clicked off, Rhiannon glanced at her father. Face deathly pale, he pushed away from the table and left the room, his bowl still full, muttering something about curses.
Rhiannon grimaced and pushed her own food away, unable to stomach it either, but she waited patiently for Brodie to finish his dinner, then got him ready for bed. After she switched off his light, she went back downstairs and cleaned up the kitchen, then looked through the fridge so she could write a shopping list. But when she grabbed the notepad out of the drawer and saw her mum’s large, distinctive scrawl at the top – tomatoes, lentils, pumpkin, herbs, soap – grief slammed into her and knocked her off her feet.
As she slid to the floor, tears started to fall, and she sobbed until she could barely breathe. It still seemed so surreal, so hard to grasp. Her mum, always so vibrant, was never coming home. The woman who wrote out the weekly shopping list. Who listened patiently to their troubles and soothed their fears. Who dropped them off to and picked them up from all their after-school activities. Who was her best friend.
She would never see her again.
Anger shot through Rhiannon then, and she felt like raging to god, or her mother’s goddess, at the injustice of it all. As her emotions built to an agonising crescendo, the storm that had been brewing all afternoon hit, and a sense of satisfaction grew within her as it shook the house just as she was shaking her fist at the heavens.
For a moment she felt separate from her body, felt like she was part of the storm. She had a sudden flash of the fear she’d felt the night before when she’d been transported outside into the rain. But that didn’t make any sense – she couldn’t have just beamed down into the garden like someone in a Star Trek movie – so she dismissed the crazy notion and went back to enjoying the violence and power of the storm raging outside, as it raged within her just as fiercely.
It felt right, that the whole world was crying for her mother.
Chapter 8
After the Storm
Rhiannon…
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Groaning, Rhiannon pulled the pillow over her head and tried to block out the sound of the howling wind and the insistent banging, but it continued to hammer at her skull, driving her even crazier than she already felt. Untangling her limbs from the quilt, she staggered out of bed and tried to figure out the direction of the noise.
It was the top shutter above her window seat, which must have come loose in the storm that had been raging for the last three nights. She hoisted herself up and slammed it shut, then collapsed down onto the cushions.
Pulling her legs up, she wrapped her arms around her knees and fell back against the window pane. It shot icy shivers up her back as her skin made contact with the frozen glass, but she welcomed the sensation of pain, and the chill that soaked into her bones, and into her heart.
Gloomily she lifted her head and gazed outward through the bleakness of the pre-dawn haze, eyes skimming over the dull green of the grass in their backyard, the muted hues of the flowers she could just make out beneath her window, and the gentle beauty of the tor in the distance.
Unseeing.
Uncomprehending.
Uncaring.
Unbalanced, she might add. Since her mum had died three days ago, she’d lost the ability to cope, to function, to do anything more than hide in her room in a daze. She’d been okay the first night, fired up with adrenaline and the need to protect her brother. But after cooking and cleaning and coping through dinner, she’d returned to her room and slowly fallen apart.
Leaning down, she picked up a woollen jumper from the mess on her floor and pulled it over her head, then wrapped the quilt around her shivering form. Nothing helped though, because the ice in her heart had spread outward, had infected her whole self, and she had no idea how to thaw it out.
It was autumn, a time of crisp blue skies, pale sunshine and vivid flame-coloured leaves, yet in this room, in this body, in this mind, it was the deepest and darkest midwinter. She was frozen, numb, and so tired of crying, so tired of feeling disconnected from herself, from the world, from her father and her brother. She knew she should be downstairs comforting Brodie, trying to help him understand the immensity of their loss, and yet she wondered if there was any point drumming into him just how much had been taken from him.
Wasn’t ignorance bliss? Mike had told him Beth had died, explaining that Mumma had been taken to heaven to help the angels, and while he wouldn’t be able to see her again, she would always be with him, always watching out for him, always holding his hand and caring about him.
Her soul ached to tell him the truth, to rip away the sugar coating, yet another part of her just wanted to stroke his forehead and soothe away his pain, his confusion, his attempts to grapple with the well-intentioned words of well-meaning adults. To soothe away the horrifying fact that their mother was dead, and turn back time to make things turn out differently.
The anger was torturing her, consuming her, but she couldn’t stop herself feeling it, or turn it off in any way – it just kept burning and shaking through her, in time with the storm raging outside her window.
Just last week Beth had convinced them all that she was improving, that her will to live and her obvious need and determination to be back with her family was enough to heal her, to save her, to transform her. And yet despite all reassurances to the contrary, she had been torn away from them. Her death was real, and it broke Rhiannon’s heart moment after moment after moment to be reminded of it.
The sound of a teardrop splashing onto paper shook her back to the present, and she stared down, bleary eyed, at the notebook in her lap, puzzled to see words scratched across the page in an angry red scrawl. She hadn’t even realised that she’d picked up the pen, but it was definitely her handwriting.
The storm.
The maze.
The fear.
The guilt.
The pain.
The horror.
The scream.
The e
cho.
The silence.
The agony.
The fire.
The burn.
The cracks.
The devastation.
The breaking down.
The breaking open.
The dissolution.
The dissolving into nothingness.
Her mouth opened in a silent scream, and she felt herself falling, until the world went black around her.
A few hours later she awoke to silence, dead silence, which was just as unnerving as the storm had been. Her room was achingly, devastatingly, lacking in any noise whatsoever. There was no restless wind howling around the corner of the house, no shifting of the floorboards as they creaked and cracked. It was eerily still, and for a brief moment she hoped that death had come for her too.
Yet she had no such luck. Heralded by a crash of thunder, sound washed over her again. She heard the flapping of birds flying past the house, imagined she could feel the beat of a butterfly’s wings outside the glass, pricked up her ears as she tried to listen to her father and Brodie downstairs in the kitchen. Desperately she wished she could fly away on feathered wings, but she couldn’t. Her anchors were here in this house, and she knew she couldn’t leave either one of them behind, couldn’t indulge her fantasies of leaving this world, not when the only two people she cared about needed her to remain.
Not that she was much use to them right now, sitting up here, yet she couldn’t bring herself to move, couldn’t face the thought of tackling the stairs – or seeing their sad faces and disappointment. She supposed she was meant to step up now, to fill her mother’s shoes and keep the family together, but she was too busy breaking down to hold anything together.
* * * * *
The next morning she woke earlier than she had been, surprised to feel the sun on her face, and for the first time since her mum had died, she felt hungry enough to drag herself out of bed and traipse downstairs. Relief flooded her when she realised she had the house to herself, and she stood in the kitchen and ate yoghurt straight from the container as she wondered what on earth to do with herself. For a while she paced, thinking of chores she should be doing, but she had no will to start.
Into the Storm: Into the Storm Trilogy Book One Page 8